Cutlery

Background

Eating or serving with utensils made of silver, silver-plated metals or
stainless steel
is relatively recent. Silver needed to be discovered in sufficient
quantities, the smelting processes necessary to hand-craft silver needed
to be refined, and in Northern Europe it took several centuries before the
more civilized Latin table manners replaced the cruder Anglo-Saxon ones.

Henry VIII, the most famous of England's Tudors, used his hands to
tear off large pieces of beef from an entire roast set before him, throw
the meat on his trencher board, chop off smaller pieces and shovel them in
his mouth. Such table manners were acceptable until the publication of
books on manners by Castiglione (1478-1529) and Peacham (1576-1643).
Around that time, fine silver table services and eating implements were
introduced into English court life. Banquet halls started to use solid
silver platters and plates, silver-mounted drinking vessels,
silver-handled knives and a variety of spoons. Unassisted bare hands,
however, remained the norm for the "lower orders" in England
for another century or so.

The spoon was one of man's earliest inventions, possibly as old as
the custom of drinking hot liquids. In Northern Europe, the first spoons
were carved from wood. Later specimens were fashioned out of horns of
cattle, ivory tusks, bronze, and eventually silver and
gold.

The earliest mention of spoons made from precious metals is found in the
Book of Exodus, when Moses is commanded to make dishes and spoons of pure
gold for the Tabernacle. Moses asked Bezalel (the first spoon-maker known
to us by name in history) to work in gold, silver and brass. Since Bezalel
had come with Moses out of Egypt, he must have learned his trade there.

Many Egyptian spoons were cast in the form of handled dishes with a cover
and a spout, an elaborate but not very practical design. Greek and Roman
spoons, on the other hand, looked much more like the spoons we are used to
seeing in modern times. Pan, the patron of shepherds and huntsmen, was
honored with spoons in the shape of a goat's foot. The Roman
fiddle-patterned spoon, originating in the first or second century A.D.,
resembles the modern type we know today, except for its squared off
stem-head, rather than the arched appearance with which we are familiar.

The first English spoons, made of horn or wood, were probably imitations
of those brought in by Roman troops in Britain. The Angles and Saxons
introduced a spoon with small, pear-shaped bowl. By the fourteenth
century, castings of bronze, brass, pewter and sheet tin were fairly
common.

The knife, used by hunters and soldiers for cutting and spearing the meat,
was first made of flint, then of metal. Its main characteristic was a
sharp edge. Traces of the primitive knife, such as the incurved shape at
the top, or the beveling of the metal to achieve an edge, are still
present in some of our styles today. Handles at first were only long
enough to allow a firm grip for carving.

In the 1630s, the Duke de Richelieu, chief minister to France's
Louis XIII, ordered the kitchen staff to file off the sharp points of all
house knives and bring them to the royal
table, thereby introducing the knife as an every-day eating utensil for
the aristocracy.

Forks were introduced at the table around the time of the Crusades, at the
beginning of the twelfth century, when Venice's Doge Domenice
Silvie and his Dogess placed a fork beside each plate at one of their
banquets. The forks took about three centuries to gain acceptance,
probably because the custom of placing food in one's mouths with
both hands, five fingers, or—for the refined few—three
fingers, was more expedient than using a new gadget.

Most dinner guests first carried their own knives. After the introduction
of forks, the custom of guests providing their own eating utensils
continued, and attention was given to minimize the space occupied by the
knife and fork when not in use, with the fork sometimes serving as a
handle for the spoon.

The production of tableware on a wide scale in England after 1650 played a
large role in improving the dinner-table etiquette. In time, strict laws
demanding high standards greatly enhanced the quality of silverware.
Silversmiths were required to stamp their name, the place, and the date of
their manufactured goods on their pieces. The word
"sterling" came to mean "of unexcelled
quality." From 1670, English homes of the upper classes had silver
spoons as a matter of course, and had already started the custom of
passing them on to their heirs. American silversmiths widely copied these
spoons. In fact, the colonial craftsmen's first silver goods were
spoons. Table knives with steel blades started to appear around this time
as well. However, silver forks and sophisticated serving vessels were rare
until the late eighteenth century.

Before the seventeenth century, silver could be melted and poured into
shaped molds to be cast into a variety of objects, but more often it was
hand beaten with sledge hammers on an anvil, or coerced into flatsheets of
the required thickness by a version of the old-fashioned laundry mangle
with iron instead of wooden rollers. The hammering of the sheet caused it
to become brittle after a certain amount of time, and therefore unfit for
further working. At that point, it was annealed, or placed under heat of
about 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit (540 degrees Celsius), then plunged into
cold water, after which the hammering could be resumed.

Workers sit astride their grinding wheels in this photo from the
Rockford (III.) Cutlery Co., taken about 1900.

F
irst used in the mid-nineteenth century, the term
"silverware," referring to Sterling silver or silverplated
tableware, has become synonymous with cutlery. Still, cutlery has been
made of iron for centuries. In Great Britain, the area of Sheffield has
been widely known for producing high-quality cutlery since the
thirteenth century. With the introduction of silverplating in the late
eighteenth century, the area also became identified with silverplated
goods, thus "Sheffield plate."

Not surprisingly, Americans who sought to compete with Sheffield cutlery
in the nineteenth century overcame opposition by reducing the cost of
their cutlery through the use of powered machinery and simplification of
the production process. By 1871, the Russell Manufacturing Company of
Turner's Fall, Massachusetts, had reduced the sequence to sixteen
steps, each of which might be performed by different individuals. The
company consumed annually 700 tons of steel, 200 tons of grindstones,
and 22 tons of emery; and for handles, 18 tons of ivory, 56 tons of
ebony, 29 tons of rosewood, and 150 tons of cocoawood. Despite the
growth, one thing that did not improve for workers in the United States
was industrial hygiene. Grinders, especially, were subjected to large
doses of metallic dust and commonly succumbed to
"grinders' disease," or silicosis.

The most famous product innovation associated with the American cutlery
trade was the Bowie knife. With its distinctive long, heavy blade, it
was useful for both hunting and fighting. James Bowie, famed
frontiersman, designed and popularized this large sheath knife. It
became so popular and so commonly associated with violent crime during
the 1830s that several states passed laws restricting its use.

William S. Pretzer

Later, the silversmiths (or "flatters") used more
sophisticated techniques, such as waterwheels or horse-driven wheels, to
pass the metal through the rollers many times until the desired thickness
was attained.
These techniques were replaced by the steam engine in the eighteenth
century.

Special hammers—without small faces and sharp corners that might
cut the metal—were used to raise the flat sheets of metal into
hollow forms, such as pots or the bowls of spoons. Handles for spoons,
forks, or knives were shaped by casting. The most common method was to
embed a pattern (of gunmetal, wood or plaster) in a two-part frame filled
with an adhesive loam mixture, bake it hard, open the frame and remove the
pattern, then fill the cavity with molten silver, finally breaking the
mold to remove the casting. Pieces fashioned this way showed gritty
surfaces that required smoothing with file and pumice.

Sheffield plating was the first silverplating technique used. It consisted
of attaching a thin skin of sterling to one or both sides of a copper
brick,
rolling it into flatsheets, and then working it in a similar manner as
silver. This technique was replaced in 1842, when electroplating (or
sterling silver deposited by electrolysis on a base metal) was introduced.

Raw Materials

The raw material of silverware is stainless steel, sterling silver, or, in
the case of silver-plate, a base metal (such as a high-quality copper
alloy) over which a layer of silver is electrically deposited.

Stainless steel is a combination of steel, chrome and nickel. The finest
grade of metal used in producing quality lines is 18/8 stainless steel.
This means that it contains 18 percent chrome, 8 percent nickel. Stainless
steel is very popular because of its easy care, durability, and low price.

The majority of silver is obtained as a byproduct of the extraction of
lead, copper and zinc. Silver is separated from smelted lead bullion by
the Parkes process, in which zinc is added to the molten bullion that has
been heated to above the melting point of zinc. When the zinc has
dissolved, the mixture is cooled and a crust of zinc-silver alloy forms on
the surface, because the silver combines more readily with zinc than with
lead. The crust is removed, pressed to remove excess lead and then
processed in a retort to recover the zinc for reuse, leaving a silver-lead
bullion with a high silver content. Further refining of the bullion is
carried out in a cupellation furnace, where air is blown across the
surface of the molten metal to oxidize the lead and other impurities to a
slag, leaving the silver, which is cast into anode blocks. Final
purification of the silver is made by an electrolytic process. Sterling
silver consists of 925 pure silver and 75 parts of an alloy (usually
copper). This proportion is fixed by law and therefore never varies. The
copper alloy adds durability without sacrificing the natural beauty and
workability of silver.

Silverplate is the result of a process that bonds pure silver (silver more
pure than sterling) to a strong base metal. The resulting tableware is
durable, has the look and feel of silver, but is much less expensive than
sterling.

The Manufacturing
Process

Blanking

1 Production begins with rectangular, flat blanks of stainless steel,
sterling silver, or in the case of plated flatware, an alloy. Large
rolls are stamped in individual blanks, which are flat pieces roughly
the same shape as the piece to be produced.

Rolling

2 Through a series of rolling operations, these blanks are graded or
rolled to the correct thickness and shapes required by the
manufacturer's flatware patterns. First the blanks are rolled
crosswise from left to right, right to left, and lengthwise, then
trimmed to outline. Each spoon, for instance, must be thick at the base
of the handle to resist bending. This gives graded pieces the right
balance and a good feel in the hand. Each piece is now in the form of a
cleanly finished shape in the rough dimension of the utensil.

Annealing

3 Between operations, the blanks must pass through annealing ovens to
soften the metal for further machine operations. The annealing, done
under great heat, must be very accurately controlled so the final piece
will be resistant to bending and to nicks and dents when in use. The
last annealing is the most

The First step in cutlery manufacture involves blanking the
stainless steel or sterling silver to the proper shape. A series of
rolling operations then gives the piece the correct thickness. After
heat treatment and trimming, the piece has a pattern embossed on it
in a stamping operation. Finally, the piece is buffed and polished.

important, because the pieces must be just the right degree of hardness
when they are embossed. Then the metal can be forced easily into all the
tiny details in the dies and the ornamentation will be faithfully
reproduced.

Cutting to outline

4 The rolled blanks are placed in the cutout press by an operator, to
remove the excess metal and to fashion the shape of the piece. This
process is similar to cutting shapes from rolled dough. The shape of the
piece is cut out of the metal and the excess metal is remelted and
transformed back into sheets of metal to be used again. This trimming
must ensure an accurate fit of the pieces into the dies when the design
is applied.

Forming the pattern

5 The next step is the forming of the pattern. Each pattern has its own
hardened steel dies—two dies for each piece, one with the pattern
for the front of the piece, and the other with the pattern for the back
of the piece. These are carefully set in the hammers by die setters. The
operator quickly places a piece in place under the drop hammer, which
descends with a hydraulic pressure of 200 tons. (The bases of the drop
hammers are bedded in 160 cubic yards of cement.) The metal is squeezed
into every tiny detail of the ornamentation in the die, embossing the
pattern on the piece. The blow of the hammer hardens the piece for use
in the home. Surplus metal around the outline of the piece is then
removed by clipping presses.

Special steps
—
knife, spoon, and fork

6 Special steps are necessary for the creation of knives, spoons, forks,
and holloware pieces. To make the hollow handle for the knife, after two
strips of metal are formed to shape, they are then soldered together,
buffed and polished until the seam is no longer visible. The blade and
handle are

This illustrations shows how a fork looks after each operation is
performed. Although the tines are pierced before the pattern is
applied, the strip of metal that connects the tines together
isn't removed until after the pattern is embossed.

permanently joined by means of a powerful cement, which bonds with
great strength and durability.

7 With the spoon, after the pattern has been embossed upon the front and
back of the handle, the next step is the forming of the bowl. The
forming is done again under the same powerful drop hammers from accurate
steel dies. Each bowl requires two hammer blows. Surplus metal around
the outline of the spoon is removed by clipping presses. A small burr
still remains to be removed at a later operation.

8 The forming of fork tines is a similar process to that of the forming
of the spoon's bowl, but the operation takes place before the
pattern is applied to the handle. After a fork is cut to outline, it is
pierced and tined: the tines are pieced out, and the small piece of
metal that holds the tip of the tines together is removed in another
operation after the pattern has been applied.

Silver plating

9 For the silver-plated pieces, the electroplating process is an
additional step. The pieces are first prepared by being buffed so that
the edges are smooth and the surfaces are free from small holes. When
the buffing is completed, the pieces are given a thorough cleaning with
as many as 12 different chemical solutions. Finally, they undergo
electrolysis, in which a layer of silver is electrically deposited over
the base metal.

Buffing and sand polishing

10 The knives, forks and spoons are now 1
0J
buffed, then polished. Depending on the pattern, special finishing
processes can give silver-plated and sterling silver pieces a bright,
mirror-like finish, a soft, satiny glow, or a brushed or florentine
finish.

Quality Control

Final inspection checks the pieces for chafes, scratches, rough spots
between a fork's tines, discoloration, or any other flaws that
might have occurred when the pieces were stamped, shaped and polished.

The Future

Stainless steel is the preferred tableware for today's customers,
and represents the future for flatware manufacturers. According to a
senior executive at Oneida, the last major domestic manufacturer of
silverware and plated ware in the United States, purchase of sterling and
silverplated ware has been declining for the past twenty years, while
demand for stainless steel continues to grow.

Where To Learn More

Books

Clayton, Michael.
Christie's Pictorial History of English and American Silver.
Phaidon, 1985.